Scholasticism
Making faith a matter of reasons: posing each question, hearing the objections, then deciding by drawing distinctions.
c. 1077 – c. 1617 · living tradition
The name given to the philosophy and theology taught in the schools, and then the universities, of Latin Europe. The monastic and cathedral schools had prepared it since the early Middle Ages; here it is taken to begin with , whose (1077-1078) pursues "faith seeking understanding". helped fix its method by setting conflicting authorities side by side, in the Sic et non. The Latin translations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought and his Arabic commentators, and , into the universities, and Paris became the home of the great syntheses: , . and called them into question in the early fourteenth century. The movement is a method more than a doctrine. The (quaestio) and the (disputatio), in which objections are set out before a determination is given, serve opposing theses: on universals, Thomas's moderate realism, Scotus's common nature and Ockham's ; on the primacy of intellect or will. Logic and natural philosophy hold as large a place in it as theology. The "second scholasticism" of Salamanca and Coimbra carried it on as far as , the end point chosen here, though its teaching continued well beyond. The humanists, and then , fought it; neo-Thomism revived it from 1879.
Reason does not contradict faith: it prepares it, defends it and orders its articles, even where it cannot demonstrate them.
God's existence is disputed by argument, not by authority alone, even if that means contesting the worth of other people's proofs.
Justification
The intellective soul survives the body: tries to demonstrate it, but the separated soul is not the complete person, and the resurrection of bodies, an article of faith, remains necessary for complete beatitude. holds that reason cannot prove that we have an immaterial intellective soul. He nonetheless accepts it on faith.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75, a. 6 and I-II, q. 4, a. 5 · Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, I, q. 10
Justification
The good is grounded in God, but scholasticism divides over how. For , is the rational creature's participation in the : reason can read what is good, because God commands what is good. For , moral obligation comes from divine command, and God could have commanded otherwise; yet right reason remains the rule of the virtuous act, because God commands that we follow it. This is the that all modern moral philosophy would go on to debate.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 91, a. 2 · Ockham, Questions on Book II of the Sentences, q. 15
Justification
The starting point is a postulate of unity: truth comes from a single source, so true philosophy cannot contradict faith (, I, 7). draws a division of labour from it. Reason establishes the , such as God's existence, and refutes objections to the mysteries; it does not demonstrate the Trinity. narrows what reason can prove: he denies that God's uniqueness can be strictly demonstrated by natural reason; harmony remains, but a growing share of the truths of faith escapes demonstration.
Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2
Anselm, Proslogion, I · Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2 · Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, I, q. 1
Justification
Scholasticism is not content to believe in God: it puts his existence in question, in the sense of the quaestio. thinks he can prove it from the concept of God alone, that than which nothing greater can be conceived. rejects this argument and argues from effects, in the . demonstrates the existence of a first being, and then its infinity. The disagreement concerns the proofs, never the thesis, and that is precisely what characterizes the school.
Anselm, Proslogion, II-IV · Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 1-3 · Duns Scotus, A Treatise on God as First Principle, IV
Justification
God is distinct from the world he creates from nothing; defines him as subsistent being itself. The scholastics dispute how to speak of him: by for Thomas, for whom "being" is not said in the same sense of God and of creatures; by the for , for whom a common concept of being is required to know God at all. His is not in question.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 13 · Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 3
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- TransmitsNeoplatonismNeoplatonism reached scholasticism through texts that concealed their origin: Pseudo-Dionysius, read as a disciple of Saint Paul, and the Liber de causis, ascribed to Aristotle, which Thomas Aquinas was among the firs…Read
- TransmitsBoethiusUntil the twelfth century, Latin logic amounted almost entirely to what Boethius had translated and commented on from Aristotle and Porphyry, the "old logic".Read
- TransmitsFalsafaThe twelfth-century Latin translations made in Toledo brought Avicenna and Averroes into the universities.Read
↓ Influence exerted
- challenged byRenaissance humanismThe humanists blamed scholasticism for its barbarous Latin and for subtleties that make no one better.Read
- challenged byDescartesTrained by the Jesuits at La Flèche, Descartes rejects the physics of substantial forms and the method of disputation, which in his view only multiplies opinions.Read